Guilty Pleasures
By Associated Press
La Scala concert features violins that inmates made from battered migrant boats
MILAN | The violins, violas and cellos played by the Orchestra of the Sea in its debut performance at Milan’s famed Teatro alla Scala carry with them tales of desperation and redemption.
The wood that was bent, chiseled and gouged to form the instruments was recovered from dilapidated smugglers’ boats that brought migrants to Italy’s shores; the luthiers who created them are inmates in Italy’s largest prison.
The project, dubbed Metamorphosis, focuses on transforming what otherwise might be discarded into something of value to society: rotten wood into fine instruments, inmates into craftsmen, all under the principle of rehabilitation.
Two inmates were granted leave to see the Orchestra of the Sea’s debut concert Monday featuring 14 prison-made stringed instruments playing a program that included works by Bach and Vivaldi. They sat in the royal box alongside Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala.
“I feel like Cinderella,” said Claudio Lamponi, as a friend approached in the lobby before the show with a bow-tie to complement his new suit. “This morning I woke up in an ugly, dark place. Now I am here.”
Far from the stately La Scala opera house, the Opera prison on Milan’s southern edge has over 1,400 inmates, including 101 mafiosi held under a strict regime of near-total isolation.
Other inmates, like Nikolae, who joined Lamponi at La Scala, are permitted more latitude. Since joining the prison’s instrument workshop in 2020, Nikolae — who declined to give his full name and prefers to skim over the charges that landed him in prison a decade ago — has become Opera’s master craftsman, graduating from crude instruments made out of plywood to harmonious violins worthy of La Scala’s stage.
“That’s how I began to speak with the wood,” Nikolae said recently in the prison workshop, which is filled with the smell of wood chips amid the rows of chisels and the faint hum of a jigsaw. “I started with very poor materials, and they saw I had good dexterity.”
Working on the instruments four to five hours a day gives him a sense of tranquility, he said, to reflect on “the mistakes I made” and skills that allow him to consider a future. “I am gaining self-esteem,’’ he said, “which is no small thing.”
One “graduate” of the prison workshops has completed his sentence and is working as a master luthier at another prison, in Rome.
“I hope one day, I can be recuperated, like this violin,’’ Nikolae said.
For another prisoner, who preferred to remain anonymous, making the instruments is a form of therapy, physical and psychological. He lived through two wars in his home country, which he also asked not to be identified because he served time as a political prisoner there and says he was beaten to the point of needing a crutch to walk.
He falls into a trance as he gently chisels the back of a violin’s front piece, measuring the thickness with an instrument to achieve perfect pitch. Dig too much, and it’s back to the drawing board. His own rocky journey to a new country has given him an understanding of the desperation that drove migrants onto unseaworthy boats.
“As I am working on these pieces, I think of the refugees that this wood transported, the women and children,” he said. “I think only of that as I work, what this piece of wood has lived.”
Lamponi and fellow inmate Andrea Volonghi have found new purpose in their life sentences, pulling apart the smugglers’ boats deposited in a yard among the prison blocks. Originally, the boats were being transformed into crucifixes and nativity scenes, but the inmates who were already trained luthiers thought: why not instruments?
So they now look for the prime pieces for the instrument workshop, removing rusted nails in the process. They send the more damaged wood to another prison in Rome, where prisoners make crucifixes for rosaries. In a full-circle moment, the rosaries are assembled by migrants at a Vatican workshop.
The boats arrive at Opera as they were seized, still containing remnants of the migrants’ lives, and with them a reminder of the 22,870 migrants that the U.N. says have died or gone missing on the perilous central Mediterranean crossing since 2014.
A shoulder bag with a disposable diaper, baby bottle and infant shoes sits on one prow alongside tins of anchovies and tuna from Tunisia and many plastic sandals.
“We don’t know what happened to them, but we hope they survived,’’ Volonghi said, considering a tiny pink sneaker with a well-known Western logo.
Each instrument takes 400 hours to create, from disassembling the boats to the finished product. While a classic violin made in the famed workshops of Cremona, an hour’s drive from Milan, will use fir and maple, the instruments of the sea are assembled from a softer African fir, the sun- and sea-drenched hues of blue, orange and red left as a reminder of the journey. The veneer of paint influences the instruments’ timbre.
“These instruments, which have crossed the sea, have a sweetness that you could not imagine,’’ said cellist Mario Brunello, a member of the Orchestra of the Sea. “They don’t have a story to tell. They have hope, a future.”
The House of the Spirit and Arts Foundation that first brought workshops for making stringed instruments to four Italian prisons a decade ago hopes the concert at La Scala will be the beginning of a movement to bring Orchestra of the Sea performances first to the southern European countries bearing the brunt of migration, then to the northern capitals that hold the most sway in migrant policy.
“The beauty is that music overcomes all divisions, all ideologies, goes to the heart and soul of people, and one hopes that it makes people think,” said foundation president Arnoldo Mosca Mondadori. “Politicians need to think of this drama.”
Jon Stewart’s return to ‘The Daily Show’ felt familiar to those who missed him while he was away
NEW YORK | No, Jon Stewart really wasn’t sitting at his desk at Comedy Central for the last nine years, waiting for someone to turn the lights back on.
Yet it almost felt that way during Stewart’s return to “The Daily Show” Monday night. His signature moves — blunt satire, facial grimaces, incisive use of video and some occasional lectures — were all intact. Public figures are served notice that the media’s sharpest bull detector is back on the job.
Stewart has said that the lack of a comedic outlet for his observations as the presidential campaign unfolded largely drove his decision to reprise his most memorable role, one night a week through the election. The much-diminished Comedy Central, unable to find a successor to Trevor Noah as host, happily welcomed him back.
Questions about the future of late-night TV, which is rapidly shedding viewers and losing influence, won’t be answered in one night. Neither will that night prove Stewart can regain the position of prominence he stepped away from in August 2015.
But it was a promising start.
“Are you disappointed yet?” Stewart said after one sophomoric joke, about naming “The Daily Show” election coverage, “Indecision 2024: Electile Dysfunction.”
HE DOVE DIRECTLY INTO THE NEWS OF THE DAY
Stewart seemed to take a page from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow when she turned a daily hosting role into a weekly one. Both resisted trying to do too much, to cram a week’s — or in Stewart’s case, nine years — worth of material into one show. He moved swiftly into the news, and up-to-date doings of President Joe Biden and his Republican rival.
In Biden’s case, it meant directly addressing questions about his age and fitness for office, which the president’s supporters surely want to avoid. He examined Biden’s news conference last week meant to counter characterizations in special counsel Robert Hur’s report on classified documents found in Biden’s home.
“Joe Biden had a big press conference to dispel the notion that he may have lost a step and, politically speaking, lost three or four steps,” he said.
He said about Biden aides who thought it was a good idea for him to turn down a Super Bowl interview in favor of a TikTok appearance: “Fire everyone.”
Stewart showed tape of administration officials like Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats testifying to Biden’s sharpness and suggested it might be a good idea to film the president in those meetings so the public can see him.
Yet Stewart also used tightly-edited videotape of Donald Trump and his family during depositions saying they couldn’t recall things to counter the notion that Biden is alone in showing memory issues during such high-pressure legal proceedings. “The Daily Show” even found one where Trump said he couldn’t remember talking about how good his memory is.
His main point: Worries about whether either the 81-year-old Biden or 77-year-old Trump are up to the toughest job in the world shouldn’t be swept under the rug.
“It is the candidates’ job to assuage concerns, not the voters’ job not to mention them,” Stewart said.
HE WAS PRETTY WELL-RECEIVED BY CRITICS
Based on one night, a handful of critics noted Stewart’s seamless transition.
Alison Herman of Variety wrote that “it almost seemed like he never left,” a phrase repeated in the headlines of reviews by both NPR critic Eric Deggans and CNN’s Brian Lowry.
“From the show’s opening moments, Stewart eased back into the host’s chair without missing a beat, firing off jokes with a familiar style that felt like he had left just a few weeks ago, rather than in 2015,” Deggans wrote. “He brought a confidence the show sorely needs.”
Jeremy Egner of The New York Times wrote that “Stewart’s first night found him grayer — at one point he used his own wizened face as a prop in a joke about the presidential candidates’ ages. But he was otherwise in classic form.”
The comparison of Stewart returning to “The Daily Show” and two candidates likely staging a rematch was too obvious to let go by. Correspondent Dulce Sloan, ostensibly talking about discouraged voters, said they needed someone new, more than just “old white dudes” coming back to reclaim a job.
“We’re talking about the election, right?” Stewart said.
The “campaign” interlude allowed Stewart, and viewers who had drifted away from “The Daily Show” after he left, to become acquainted with unfamiliar cast members. An on-set interview with Jordan Klepper, who will host the show for the rest of the week, was less successful.
During his time away, Stewart spent time as an activist fighting to get benefits for Sept. 11, 2001, responders and two years hosting “The Problem with Jon Stewart” on the Apple TV+ streaming service. He made a subtle allusion to the latter on Monday, saying he would be making jokes about China and AI, subjects that reportedly made Apple uncomfortable before axing the show.
Pearl Jam gives details of new album ‘Dark Matter,’ drops first single, announces world tour
LOS ANGELES | Pearl Jam’s forthcoming album is called “Dark Matter,” its first single of the same title has been released, and the band will start a world tour in May.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Famers revealed the new details on the project and their 2024 plans on Tuesday.
“Dark Matter,” their 12th studio album and first since 2020’s “Megaton,” will be released April 19 on Monkeywrench and Republic records. A tour is scheduled to begin May 4 in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Singer Eddie Vedder, 59, lead guitarist Mike McCready, 57, and bassist Jeff Ament, 60, played the record for the first time on Jan. 31 for invited guests at the Troubadour club in West Hollywood. “No hyperbole, I think this is our best work,” Vedder said from the stage as he introduced the album.
The band spawned from the Seattle scene of three decades ago shows no signs of softening with age on the album, which leans toward their rocking side even more than “Megaton” did, with drummer Matt Cameron’s pounding at the forefront.
The record, produced by Andrew Watt at Rick Rubin ‘s Shangri-La studio in Malibu, has been ready and awaiting release for about a year.
—From AP reports
